If you don't want to wait until the official release of Rails 3, but are anxious to sink your teeth into the juicy Arel goodness, Grant Ammons recently released fake_arel. With it, you'll get the syntactic sugar and method chaining of Arel in Rails 2, while using calls that are Rails 3-compatible.

Back in Episode #28, we covered the Rails Best Practices gem by Richard Huang. Now, he's released a website which utilizes the community to contribute to, comment and vote on the items in that list. So, if you have an idea of how everyone can do something better, send it over.

This weekend, Anthony Heukmes let us know about a new JavaScript web framework named Choco. On the server-side, the framework uses Ruby to generate the application structure and JavaScript and the framework provides MVC-style layering. If small, AJAX-driven sites are your thing, take a look.

Marcin Kulik recently released coloration, a gem which allows you to easily convert your editors' coloring themes between them. It supports VIM, TextMate, JEdit, and Kate and he even provides you with a simple web app to use if you don't want to run the gem yourself.

At OSCON last week, we were able to capture Ilya Grigorik's talk entitled, "No Callbacks, No Threads, and Ruby 1.9." In it, Ilya demonstrates how to build a non-blocking Rails stack with Ruby 1.9, Rails 3, and a fiber pool of database connections using em-synchrony and the mysqlplus driver.

Mislav Marohnić recently posted a few tips in git which you'll probably find to be incredibly useful. Some of the one-liners include searching commits via regular expression, viewing word-diffs instead of line-diffs, and quickly determining what branches a change set has affected.

If you find yourself embedding Gists onto your own site, you may be sad to learn that you may be decreasing the perceived speed of your website. Rather than having every client pull down JavaScript and load their own copy, Daniel Huckstep released rack-gist which downloads and caches the gist in the background.